# TSWAP: A Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Thai Wellness Advisor

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22917/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Medical and biomedical RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/medical-and-biomedical-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08775/) (2025)
- [Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15217/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13178/) (2024)
- [Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13132/) (2023)
- [Typhoon: Thai Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13951/) (2023)
- [SEA-LION: Southeast Asian Languages in One Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05747/) (2025)
- [Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03608/) (2024)
- [Large language models provide unsafe answers to patient-posed medical questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18905/) (2025)
- [Typhoon 2: A Family of Open Text and Multimodal Thai Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13702/) (2024)
- [OpenThaiGPT 1.5: A Thai-Centric Open Source Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07238/) (2024)
- [TCM-Ladder: A Benchmark for Multimodal Question Answering on Traditional Chinese Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24063/) (2025)
- [HEALTH-PARIKSHA: Assessing RAG Models for Health Chatbots in Real-World Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13671/) (2024)
- [MTCMB: A Multi-Task Benchmark Framework for Evaluating LLMs on Knowledge, Reasoning, and Safety in Traditional Chinese Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01252/) (2025)
- [WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15239/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present TSWAP, a deployed eight-language conversational wellness advisor grounded, via retrieval-augmented generation, in a verified knowledge base of Thai traditional medicine and certified wellness providers. An unmodified open-weight LLM (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on vLLM) is grounded on a ~30.6K-chunk Thai index by a hybrid dense-sparse retriever with cross-encoder reranking; a first-turn query classifier forces tool-based retrieval for entity lookups; a rule-based safety layer enforces medical scope and Thai emergency routing; and all eight languages are served zero-shot with translate-then-retrieve. We release the first Thai traditional-medicine/wellness retrieval benchmark (50 questions with gold document IDs; Recall@5 = 0.88), production QA logs (91.1% test-retest pass over 259 cases), and a 71-question frontier no-retrieval probe showing what each grounding pillar contributes: without the safety prompt the backend model family produced a full drug-dosing schedule and complied with out-of-scope requests, and without the knowledge base it produced zero verifiable provider recommendations. We further report two transferable deployment findings: English-calibrated 4-bit AWQ quantization corrupts Thai tone marks, and forced-retrieval routing is necessary for reliable grounding.